Research in focus

Hellenising dance

FWF project: PAT4968225 (2027-2030)

Principal Investigator: Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar 

Project website in progress 

In the 1930s, when the appropriation of the classical past became key to nationalist propaganda in Italy, the fascist regime also took influence over the Istituto Nazionale Dramma Antico (INDA), which re-staged Greek tragedies at the theatre of Syracuse and at other archaeological sites. Despite the all-Italian image cast on the spectacles, INDA looked abroad for dancing choruses that might not only meet high expectations, but also align with fascist aesthetics regarding, in particular, group movement and the female body. The choice fell on the Hellerau-Laxenburg-Schule, a leading institution for eurhythmics based near Vienna. With this international collaboration, the Syracusan stage effectively became a laboratory that hybridised Hellenising, modernist and fascist notions of dance.

Why did INDA opt for foreign dance vocabularies in a climate of nationalist appropriations of classical antiquity? And how was the subversive vocation of modernist dance adapted to fascist ideologies about regimented group movement and women’s docility? Our project is the first comprehensive attempt to answer these questions. We thus shed light on how the “Greek” chorus came to act as a catalyst for exchanges between seemingly disparate dancescapes – classicist and modernist, nationalist and cosmopolitan, conformed and emancipated, philologically reconstructed and visionary.